Eyes of the Dead: Tales from the Doors of the Unknown

Mika Waltari released a collection of horror tales entitled The Eyes of the Dead: Tales from the Doors of the Unknown at the young age of 17. Deeply influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, the young writer crafted stories bound together by uncanny events and grim, often unsettling deaths.

The pieces are steeped in drama and charged with a subtle undercurrent of  erotic tension. Many of them hint at an unseen presence – a mysterious force that is hovering just beyond perception.

The settings range from the vividly exotic to the claustrophobically intimate. Some stories unfold on remote locations such as a shadowy island or near the ancient pyramids of Egypt while others remain confined to a solitary rented room, where a young law student is haunted by visions that blur the boundary between reality and hallucination, his senses sharpened and distorted by cocaine.

Waltari’s imagination moved like a raven through landscapes of despair, past mysteries, dreams of distant lands and fevered nightmares. His tales carry the scent of decay and the sweet haze of opium. His fascination with ancient Egypt appears already in the story called The Mummy in which an Egyptologist spends a night of intimacy in the embrace of a female mummy within a golden sarcophagus.

In these stories first published under the pseudonym Kristian Korppi in 1926, Waltari experimented with a range of different narrative forms, from historical fabulation to fragmentary diary entries. Even at this early stage, he reveals himself as a remarkably a versatile storyteller.

Reviews

“Horror without gory excess, modern technology, or high-speed thrills offers a pleasantly calm escape from the present day and from the world around us. The author’s language is vivid and powerful – it is hard to believe that the writer was only seventeen.” – Marjatta Ojala, Tampere University 

Original publication date: 1926
Original publisher: Schildt
Page count: 150 pp
Material: New edition published by WSOY, 2023